I’ve read one other book by Peter F. Hamilton, Pandora’s Star. He’s made a name for himself writing big, intricate space opera. From what I can tell, The Reality Dysfunction is what put him on the map. But it’s a big book, and for the U.S. release it was split into two parts. Emergence and Expansion.
Emergence sets up a universe of humans who have essentially split into two camps: Adamists and Edenists. Edenists have spliced a gene into their genome that gives them affinity
, or telepathic abilities. In addition, Edenists have developed bitek, an organic technology and life form that they use to build space habitats, robots, and all sorts of other useful things. Adamists reject the affinity gene, but do use such things as neural nanonics
, nanotechnology that enhances human capability, and genetic engineering in general.
There are essentially two sub-plots here which become more intertwined as the book progresses: the story of Lalonde, a new colony, and that of Joshua Calvert, a young starship captain trying to establish himself.
The story of Calvert is less fraught with dangerous implications for humanity at first. He fights off pirates who would prevent him from refitting his starship. He befriends the Lord of Ruin, who rules a constructed habitat in space near the suicidal ruins of an alien settlement. Her family’s life goal is to find out what caused the Laymil to self-destruct and save humanity from the danger if needed. Calvert slowly establishes himself and towards the end plans on trading a shipment of Norfolk Tears for untold riches. Norfolk Tears are an exceedingly rare alcoholic beverage that is worth quite a bit. He intends to obtain the Norfolk Tears by trading a load of the hardest wood in the known galaxy to the people of Norfolk, who eschew a technological society. The place where the wood, mayope, can be found? Lalonde.
Lalonde is less the story of one person. Hamilton follows the story from colonists’ perspectives, from prisoners’ perspectives, from the authorities’ perspecitves, and more. Out in the boonies, a new settlement is established. The prisoners sentenced to hard labor provide much of the sweat to build things. Subtly, one prisoner unites the rest under his control and that of his satanic religion. With infrared vision, he sees people hidden in the jungle, correctly surmising that a group is hiding out from the authorities in the remote area. They try to use each other, but things fall apart quickly, and soon the regular settlers are involved as well. The settlers quickly move to murder every last prisoner. In the process, a watching alien accidentally opens a rift to some other place, and the beings that emerge take over the prisoners bodies. They quickly infect
all with whom they come in contact.
Will they take over the colony planet? What does this mean for the rest of humanity and known aliens? How will the Lalonde-visiting Calvert play into this? Read the book and it’s sequel/second half to find out.
It’s a decently intelligent read, though I wouldn’t classify it as a top S.F. book as some others do. My largest problem is with the setup. Did you notice the watching alien
part I threw in the middle of that paragraph above? Yeah. There’s a floating alien observing species throughout the galaxy. It’s mostly invisible, and just happens to be there to spark the whole crisis. I don’t have a problem with a coincidence of Calvert being on the planet to play his part. There would be some captain who would be on the planet to play a part, so it makes sense to have it be him and build up to it with his story. But the invisible energy alien? Not a lot of sense there.
There’s also some of the tendency to have a lot of the characters be super-human in their abilities. I mean compared to other people of their milieu. Although he also includes a fair number of people of less than average capability as well. It mostly balances out, but not completely. In the end, the people who survive do so by extra-ordinary skill, while the people who don’t do so by bad luck. In other words, the people who don’t make it don’t do so because they make mistakes. For the most part. It’s not as bad as a Resnick book in that manner, but it’s noticeable.
On the other hand, the characters are fairly believable. Hamilton has a lot of them, and he spends time with them. Only rarely is a character just a name. You get to know all the characters. He frequently builds characters up only to kill them off. In a way, I like it. It’s the opposite of the Star Trek® method of sending the guy in the red shirt who was just introduced this episode to his death. The effect here is that you care about what happens to the characters. Hamilton doesn’t soften the blow by only killing off meaningless characters. He also tends to make every character have something the reader can identify with. Even the psychopath prisoner has a justifiable resentful streak. You can get where he’s coming from.
Anyway, I have Part 2 in hand as well, and I’ll start on that tomorrow. I expect my review will have some spoilers for Part 1, so if you don’t want the spoilers for this book, don’t read my next review.
Title: The reality dysfunction: part 1: emergence
Author: Peter F. Hamilton
Series: Night’s dawn ; 1
Imprint / publisher: Aspect / Warner Books
Format: Mass market paperback
Length: 588 p.
Publication date: July 1997
ISBN-10: 0-446-60515-8
ISBN-13:
